A Visit by the BBC

Written by Tom Nugent on Thursday, June 21st, 2007

A video team from the BBC brought along Michio Kaku to interview us and to video some of LaserMotive’s early hardware during May as part of a documentary they’re working on about future technhology (the episode we’re featured in also talks about carbon nanotubes, for example). The series will air sometime this fall; we’ll post more info once we have it.

The interviews were focused more on the space elevator than power beaming itself, but we were proud that they thought LaserMotive would be the best group for them to showcase power beaming technology. Dr. Kaku had some very good questions, and for someone whose prime work is in string theory, he was very professional in his job as a TV interviewer – he easily handled multiple takes, making it always appear fresh.

Regardless of what the focus of the filming itself was, having media guests come from overseas was a great way to give us a hard deadline, and we accomplished a lot of work. I was too busy throughout the day to do much photography, but I did manage to capture their video guy and audio guy doing some prep shots:

During the day of filming, we were able to borrow a neat contraption from their videographer to mount our own camcorder to our vehicle and get some video of the vehicle’s ascent of the ribbon, from the vehicle’s perspective (1.8 MB, Quicktime 7 required). The ribbon height is only about 15 feet or so; it’s limited by the height of the building we’re in.

We want to thank the BBC for their visit, and their patience (the producer commented about TV, “Never work with animals, children, or scientists!”). We’re looking forward to seeing the episode, probably around the same time we’re heading to this year’s Power Beaming competition!